Garbage

Two days after enjoying a big, sloppy group hug
onstage with the Foo Fighters as they accepted
their Best Rock Album Grammy, Butch Vig is
still savoring the moment. “It was a great, wild
evening,” Vig says from GrungeIsDead, his
home studio in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. “We
had dinner afterward with Paul McCartney,
Bruce Springsteen, and Joe Walsh. I was pretty
fuzzy the next morning. Dave and I were up ’til
3 a.m. It was a long, fun night.”

Musing over his Foo Fighters’ production
success—just one album in a long career that
spans such million-sellers as Nirvana’s Nevermind,
Smashing Pumpkin’s Gish, Green Day’s
21st Century Breakdown, and his own band’s
1995 quadruple-Platinum debut, Garbage—Vig
stands on Mount Olympus, surveying his past
and future.

“What’s so important about Wasting Light
is the performance and feel and the vibe,” Vig
says. “When you can’t fix everything, you
really have to go for it. Rather than quantizing
guitars and chopping them all up, the new Garbage
album is rougher-sounding than Version
2.0, Beautiful Garbage, or Bleed Like Me. I compare
it to our first album. We didn’t have Pro
Tools, so you couldn’t really go crazy with [effects].
We’d run things to tape and trigger from
MIDI, but the MIDI delay was slightly off so it
would drift. Our first record has a looseness to
it. Then we got microscopic on Version 2.0. We
didn’t do any nano-editing on Not Your Kind of
People—maybe take a one-bar or two-bar chunk
and paste it around, but we didn’t go any deeper
than that. We definitely didn’t go grid-mad.”

The first Garbage album since 2005’s Bleed
Like Me, produced by Vig and Garbage and engineered
by longtime colleague Billy Bush, Not
Your Kind of People (StunVolume) traffics in
that classic Garbage sound: From Shirley Manson’s
first bitter shout out of “Lies, lies, lies”
in “Automatic Systematic Habit,” you know
Garbage is back. A Theremin squiggles, vocals
get phase-shifted and freaked, guitars pound
like short-circuiting jackhammers. “I won’t
be your dirty little secret,” Manson warns,
and it warms the heart. “Big Brite World” is
wonderfully queasy and dislocated; “Blood for
Poppies” trades rock for dub (another classic
Manson performance); “Sugar” finds the pint-sized
singer luxuriating in whispered threats
as the band swirls like floating spirits; “Man
On A Wire” recalls The Pretenders by way of
the Foo Fighters. Not Your Kind of People is a
return to form after the virtual retreat that left
a bad taste in Shirley Manson’s mouth.

“On Bleed Like Me, we shouldered a lot
of criticism because people felt we’d lost our
edge,” Manson recalls. “Looking back, we
definitely got burnt out; we toured too much.
We’d always been happy in the studio making
records, but then the music industry began to
panic; they put a lot of pressure on their artists.
[Our label] was scrabbling for more money;
they wanted our chart positions to be higher,
and quite frankly, that isn’t what we signed up
for. It really shut us down. We just lost our joy.
And you heard it in the music. Now, with time
off and having regenerated ourselves, you hear
that on the new record. It sounds like classic
Garbage. I am very proud of that.”

Culled from early 2010 jam sessions tracked
during a two-week booze-and-bullshitting fueled
Garbage reunion at the now-defunct
The Pass Studio in L.A. (then rough-mixed at
engineer Billy Bush’s Red Razor Sounds in Atwater
Village), Not Your Kind of People is a true
composite, state-of-the-digital-art recording.
After the band–drummer/producer Vig, vocalist
Manson, and guitarists Duke Erikson and
Steve Marker (aided by bassists Eric Avery and
Justin Meldal-Johnsen)—improvised a handful
of tracks, the members went their separate
ways. Garbage has closed Smart Studios in
Madison, Wisconsin, where their early records
were recorded, in favor of such destinations
as Aspen, Colorado (Steve Marker’s home),
and the more bohemian neighborhoods of L.A.
(home to Vig and Manson). Only Duke Erikson
remains in Madison. After their L.A. jam, with
laptops in hand and files in hard drives, the
band returned to their respective homes and
began deconstructing, then reconstructing the
songs with various plug-ins, effects, and instruments.
Trading two-week stints between Red
Razor Sounds (where guitar parts were replaced
and rerecorded) and home for the bulk
of 2011, Garbage wrote Not Your Kind of People
collectively and apart. The result is an album
where Vig often played guitars, Erikson contributed
drum loops, Manson pushed for ever
more bizarre vocal treatments, and Marker
built finished songs from crude MP3s. Garbage
is at their best when the lines are blurred.

“There’s no delineation between each band
member’s job,” Bush explains. “Everybody
does everything. They all produce, they all can
engineer, they all write. The ideas for pushing
things out there often came from Shirley.
Butch plays guitars, Steve makes drum loops.
They all play keyboards, they’re all good at
programming. All of that makes the band
unique. The Garbage sound only exists from
the input of all four of them.”

“A lot of the success of Garbage is in trading
ideas,” Erikson confirms. “Something will begin
as one idea then end up as something totally
different and better. You don’t have that when
you’re working totally isolated in your home
studio. Some ideas were thrown down really
quickly, and a lot of it is actually on the record.”

Not Your Kind of People is a geek wonderland
of hardware- and software-enabled
production treatments that always serve the
band’s raging electronic rock. Those trippy
dub tom effects in “Blood for Poppies” and
its freakish manual typewriter/ambient chorus?
“That’s a distorted drum fill that Butch
sampled and ran through SoundToys Decapitator,”
Bush explains. “He and Duke came up
with that section using a bunch of [Native
Instruments] Reaktor sounds for the ambience
and swells and then added some sound-effect
samples. That chattering sound is actually a
hi-hat running through GRM Doppler to create
a stereo effect. Shirley wanted the vocal in
that section to sound like it was a garbled radio
transmission so I treated it using [iZotope]
Stutter Edit, Decapitator, and Waves H-Delay.”

Bush is a big fan of both Stutter Edit and
iZotope Trash for shape-shifting Manson’s
battle-cry vocals, a key ingredient on Not Your
Kind of People. “Trash is still one of the best-sounding
sonic manglers out there,” he laughs.
“It’s all over the record. Trash allows you to
distort things in a way that no other plug-in
rivals. The other one I used was [OhmForce]
Ohmicide, a multiband distortion unit that has
more digital versions of distortion.

“I don’t really use Stutter Edit like most
people do,” he continues. “Most people use
it to freak a whole track out. I will use it as a
particular effect. I like the way it can make
[vocals] fall apart (as in “Control”) or speed up
over a period of time. If a plug-in made all of
us ask, ‘What was that?’ we’d gravitate toward
that kind of effect.”

“Big Brite World” bubbles with robotic ’80s
synths created from strained laptop plug-ins;
“Automatic Systematic Habit” piles on even
more synths. “There are a couple of synths in
the intro to ‘Big Brite World,’” Bush continues.
“Steve came up with the parts on his laptop
using [Pro Tools] Vacuum for the main two
parts and the other more ambient, panning
arpeggiated one was done in Ableton Live. The
synth in the bridge of ‘Automatic Systematic
Habit’ is a combination of [NI] Reaktor and
[Spectrasonics] Omnisphere. Reaktor is the
source of the distorted synth sound and the
choir is an Omnisphere patch. The vocal was
run through [NI] Razor to vocode it.”

Throughout the album, Manson’s vocals are
strobed, distorted, and delayed, deconstructed,
layered, and literally shattered like breaking
glass, as in “Control,” which gets extra juice from
a ripping harmonica hook. “Butch played the
harmonica but he didn’t have one in the right key
so he pitch-shifted it down a few steps to get it to
work,” Bush adds. “It gave it a great low-fi quality
and made the fact that it’s a harmonica not as
obvious. It’s run through Echo Farm and Reverb
One. We put the chorus vocals through a combination
of Decapitator, Tremolator, and PanMan.
A virtual SoundToys fiesta!”

Garbage still pen sick, sinister ballads.
(Remember “Queer”?) This time it’s “Sugar,”
where strings, guitars, and samples create
a darkly ambient sound cloud. “A lot of that
is Eventide H8000 reverb,” Bush continues.
“The ambient fuzziness is a guitar that was run
through a Death By Audio Robot pedal. There’s
also a ’verbed-out musical saw, some Omnisphere,
and most importantly Shirley’s ’verbed
-out melodica solo!”

“I have a pretty extensive setup in my Pro
Tools rig,” Vig says, “and Billy Bush has a way
bigger one with plug-ins and soft synths at Red
Razor Sounds. Once, we were trying to find
an abstract sound for something and we spent
two hours just scrolling through what seemed
like thousands of different presets with the
more exotic things. I love using [NI] Massive
and [Spectrasonics] Omnisphere and [NI] Absynth,
[FXpansion] Geist, and [NI] Kontakt.
Sometimes you want a noise or something
pretty or abstract or jagged sounding, and it’s
amazing what the software can do.”

Working from those initial jam session
tracks, Vig and Bush constantly updated their
mixes, incorporating the band’s new ideas as
they flowed in from across the country. “We
kept squeezing and saturating the sound so it
became less clean and more trashy and f*cked
up,” Vig explains. “Often we’ll run things
through submixes. All the drums are on one aux,
and all the samples and loops are on another
aux, and then I’ll start blending in Decapitator
and the Studer [A800] tape plug-in. We’d
run that across the bus and hit it harder and
harder. We’d have different harmonic plugins
that really played with tonal qualities on
each bus—vocals, guitars, bass drums, then we
wanted more and more!”

The effects extravaganza is apparent on
Vig’s DW drums, which blur the line between
programmed, live, and Lord knows what.
“You’re hearing more loopy drum programming
and the live stuff is tucked back; it’s
60/40,” Vig says. “The live drumming is so cut
up that it sounds programmed. I recorded a
lot of the drums at my home studio, basically
a 16 x 18 den where I watch football games. I
used six mics on the kit, maybe a Bock Audio
507 put back in the hallway and turn it up and
run it through Decapitator. I would do a bunch
of takes, edit them, then take them into Billy’s
studio and we’d carry on. Sometimes we’d only
use the Bock room mic and delete the rest. We
didn’t really labor over the stuff.”

Bush says Vig either programmed the
drums or he’d record drums then chop them
up and turn it into a loop, then sample a kick
and snare and throw it around in FXpansion
BFD or Geist: “For drums [DW Artist Series
set with a titanium Dunnett snare drum], we
put a FET 47 on the outside of the kick. One
of my favorites for the inside of the kick is the
Crowley & Tripp El Diablo. That’s going into
an API 512C preamp into an API 550B EQ. The
snare mic is a Telefunken M80 or a Josephson
e22S, depending on what Butch is going for.
That’s going into an API512 as well, and a 550B
and a Chandler Little Devil Compressor. Overheads
are Audio-Technica 4033s into a couple
APIs. Toms are the Josephson e22S again, into
Helios preamps. Butch likes a spaced pair of
overheads over the left and right cymbals directly
over him pointing outward to make it a
little wider. The signal from the Bock 507 ran
through Decapitator and a compressor and
was squashed to death.”

Following the album’s off-the-cuff vibe, Manson’s
vocals were cut in Vig’s comfy den, sitting
on his couch with a handheld Shure SM58. Nothing
was sacred, as when Manson recorded vocals
for “I Hate Love.” The original scratch vocal was
used, pitched down 30 BPM, then pitched back
up further 30 BPM to “make it sound clubby.”
Manson played a large role in her own vocal deconstruction,
pushing Garbage to the brink.

“I am an opinionated woman,” she says. “I
am not a ‘sit on the couch and shut up’ type
of girl, and I am sure at times my band would
prefer that I was. I have a lot of ideas that I
want to hear on my vocals; sometimes they
work, sometimes they don’t. The problem for
the band is I’ve never spent any time learning
the technical lingo. So I might say, ‘Make my
voice here sound like it’s going through a hair
dryer!’ Sometimes they want to murder me.”

At Red Razor Sounds, Manson used either
a Telefunken ELAM 251 or a Brauner VM1
K.H.E. Historically, the band used Vig’s original
Telefunken ELAM 250 or Bush’s K.H.E.
But this time, Bush wanted one mic to leave up
so he asked Telefunken to create a new 251—
Butch’s 250 was not used.

“They put together a new 251 for me with
a 6072a tube,” Bush explains. “They tried
many tubes until they found one similar to the
hard-wired AC701 tube in Butch’s 250E. The
251 they built sounded great. If I use the two
of them in stereo pairs, you can’t really tell the
difference. Butch’s has a little mid-rangey thing
that signifies it as a 50-year-old mic.”

Next in Manson’s chain was an original
Chandler Limited LTD 1 into a Retro Instruments
176 compressor. “I am not afraid of
compressing the bejesus out of the signal while
tracking,” Bush laughs. “That makes it sound
intimate and forward, and it really sits in the
mix well. It allows the singer to feel like they
can really go for it and the compressor will
just grab it and give it back to them. No matter
how dynamically Shirley sings—and Shirley is
a very dynamic singer—the Retro 176 lets her
sing right on top of the mic.

“Shirley’s voice sounds amazing regardless
of what she sings through,” he adds. “‘I Hate
Love’ was done on a 58 and you can’t tell. ‘Beloved
Freak’ was a scratch vocal, just one take.
The 251 is perfect for her vocals, but I add a
little bit of 10k, like maybe a dB and a half, and
then I take a little bit of 330 out and that’s it.”

Erikson and Marker modified their guitar
parts with a Line 6 POD and their home laptops
(Ableton Live, Pro Tools), but Bush’s initial miking
at The Pass formed the bed. “Steve played
through a Line 6 Mi6 into a Mojave JTM 45,”
Bush explains. “There I used a Heil Sound PR30
or a Heil PR22, sometimes an RCA BK-5B. An
old Garbage standby is the Matchless DC30 and
a Carol-Ann with a 12" for clean tones, then the
Mojave for heavier sounds. Duke has this weird-sounding
Fender Telecaster he loves to play into
this old Silvertone of mine, a really aggressive
amp. I used a ribbon mic on the Silvertone, just
to tame a little of the bite. Every guitar sound
was recorded with some different permutation
of a bunch of different things.”

Justin Meldal-Johnsen recorded bass
on nine tracks, Eric Avery on two. Johnsen
brought in multiple basses, which he regularly
changed out. Bush used one of the new Fender
Bassmans, miked with a FET 47. Avery played
a Fender Jaguar Bass recorded with a Groove
Tubes Viper DI and a Line 6 Bass POD.

When mixing Not Your Kind of People,
Bush took the broad approach, being careful
to fit each sound and instrument into its own
frequency range. “It’s such a geeky prospect,
making one of these records,” he laughs. “A lot
of editing goes into making sure there is space
for the frequency ranges. If you solo the guitars,
they may have really bizarre EQ settings ’cause
I want that to cut through in a specific way. A
guitar sound might need to be thin or dark in
order to fill in whatever is missing sonically in
that particular section. It’s about what needs to
be featured without losing the groove or the dynamics
or getting in the way of Shirley’s vocal.”

As veteran rockers, Garbage has a 16-year
history in an industry that was once seemingly
omnipotent, but which is now as decentralized
as the KGB. Years of ups and downs, of creating
trends and falling flat, has given the band
a unique perspective. Ultimately, Garbage has
survived and created yet another great record
due to artistic tenacity and faith in their vision.

“We sound like Garbage because we have a
sensibility that we gravitate toward,” Vig says.
“It’s important for a young artist to figure out
what their aesthetic is and what defines them.
Everyone can buy the same plug-ins, but what
can you do with them to make them more interesting
and unique? That comes from your
heart and your brain. Your sensibility is what
you love.”

“You are the only one who knows how you
feel and how you want to represent yourself
as an individual,” Manson says. “You have
to listen to who you are and be true to
how you want to represent yourself in the
world. If you are genuine and honest, people
respect that and they believe it when
they come up against it. There isn’t very
much authenticity any more. It’s all people
at recording companies deciding how to
present an artist. And that’s crazy. It can’t
end well; the artist has to be in the driver’s
seat. Always.”

But how do you believe in yourself in this
age of collapsing empire, when doubts loom and
hopes often seem dashed? “As a singer in a band
who has had a lot of ups and downs,” Manson
replies, “I know what it’s like to think, ‘Wow, I
am just getting drowned by everybody else and
all of their talents and their successes. How do
I dig myself out of this hole?’ You have to say,
‘Do I have enough reserve to stand back up and
take another hit? Another punch?’ Everybody’s
career is defined by how many times they’re
willing to get knocked down and stand back
up again. Because inevitably every single artist,
even great ones like Bob Dylan, get passed over
and forgotten about for a while. You have to find
your reserves. It’s that simple.”

Ken Micallef covers multiple genres of music
for various publications, domestic and
global. He lives in Greenwich Village with his
cat Morty and his Shindo hi-fi.